A Year After LinkedIn Came Calling, CardMunch Poised To Make “The Rolodex Obsolete”

All they wanted was some mac and cheese. It was late 2010, and Sid Viswanathan, Bowei Gai, and Sudeep Yenashankaran were outside LinkedIn’s headquarters, peering into the cafeteria. The three CardMunch cofounders had just been escorted outside after a meeting at the company, but the meals inside were too much to resist. ”There were these huge boxes of food,” recalls Viswanathan.

“And we had backpacks,” Gai says.

The team snuck back in, started filling their bags with food—and then bumped into one of the senior directors of engineering at LinkedIn, with whom they had just met. And who had just walked them out of the office building. “I have never been more embarrassed in my whole life,” Viswanathan says today, laughing.